In current telecommunications networks, especially comprising a core network having the functionality of an enhanced packet core, mobility management entities are typically gathered in one or several pools or group of pooled mobility management entities, in order to provide a higher degree of reliability, a comparatively high availability, as well as efficient resource utilization.
Within one group of pooled mobility management entities, each mobility management entity (or unit) should always have the same parameters, e.g. in terms of timers, bearer quality-of-service, load-protection mechanisms, and the like, in order to ensure the best user experience for mobile users of the telecommunications network.
Typically, each unit of a mobility management entity is responsible for the mobility management typically of a plurality of user equipments, wherein for each user equipment, the mobility management includes, inter alia, the attachment of the user equipment (UE Attach), the tracking area update (UE Tracking Area Update, TAU), the detachment of the user equipment (UE Detach). Additionally, many more procedures are handled by the mobility management entities for the respective user equipments being related thereto.
As the telecommunications networks are growing bigger and bigger, with increasing complexity, the groups of pooled mobility management entities are getting bigger or the number of pools increases. The operators of such telecommunications networks typically strive to always ensure similar configurations for a certain number of different mobility management parameters of the evolved packet core network, and this typically over the whole pool of (or group of pooled) mobility management entities—in order to ensure consistency within the group of mobility management entities and in order to be able to deliver the best user experience to the user of the telecommunications network.
However, with an increasing number of mobility management entities and/or with an increasing number of pools of (or groups of) mobility management entities, efforts to keep track of all changes that have to be applied to the different components of the system increases. This is especially true after software changes have to be applied which may affect the configurations already added to the components of the system before the new software takes place. Typically in such a situation, the conventional method relies on configuring the mobility management entities one by one, even though the data to be transferred to the different mobility management entities (of at least one pool of mobility management entities) corresponds to the same data in each case, as, typically, the operator of the telecommunications network needs to ensure the consistency of the configurations within the at least one pool of mobility management entities.